Drew Magary meditates on why there have been no fundamentally new candy bars in decades. It’s a good question. The Snickers bar, still the perfect candy bar, was introduced in the 1930s. What has happened to progress?
I think the answer is that, as much as we may like to believe in endless progress, every technological category reaches its peak. Clipper ships got as good as they were ever going to get. Airplanes, I believe, are as good as they’ll ever get: if we want to get from one place to a far-distant place in a substantially better way, we’re going to have to find a whole new way of doing it, not just try to tweak the airplane.
And thus it is with the candy bar. I suspect that, with the Snickers bar, Peak Candy-bar-ness was achieved, and we can only expect cosmetic adjustments from now on. If we ever want to move unhealthful, concentrated childish food pleasure to its next level, we’ll have to move to a new category.